Few executives have shaped a technological era as directly as Jensen Huang. The engineer co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has run it as chief executive ever since, an unusually long tenure at the top of a major technology company. Under his leadership, a business that started by making graphics chips for video games became the central supplier of computing power for the artificial intelligence boom.
From Taiwan to Silicon Valley
Huang was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States as a child, spending part of his early years in Kentucky and Oregon. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Before founding his own company, he worked as an engineer at LSI Logic and at chipmaker AMD, gaining a ground-level view of how semiconductors are designed and sold.
Founding NVIDIA
In 1993, Huang co-founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, reportedly sketching out the idea over coffee at a Denny’s. The company focused on the graphics processing unit, or GPU, a specialized chip built to handle many calculations at once. That parallel design made GPUs excellent for rendering game graphics, and it later proved to be the key to something much larger.
The bet that built the AI era
The pivotal decision came with CUDA, a software platform NVIDIA introduced in the mid-2000s that let programmers use GPUs for general-purpose computing, not just graphics. It was a long, patient investment that did not pay off immediately. When deep learning took off years later, researchers found that NVIDIA’s GPUs were ideally suited to training AI models, and CUDA had already built a deep software ecosystem around them. That head start is why NVIDIA chips now power a large share of the world’s AI models, data centers, and supercomputers.
The financial results have been staggering. In July 2025, NVIDIA became the first company in history to reach a market capitalization of four trillion dollars, and its value continued climbing past that mark. The rise has made Huang, who still owns a meaningful stake in the company, one of the wealthiest people in the world. He is known for a hands-on, technically fluent leadership style and for pushing NVIDIA to release new chip architectures on a rapid annual cadence.
Huang’s story sits alongside a small group of engineer-executives redefining modern computing, including AMD’s Lisa Su, who is also a distant relative, and Apple’s Tim Cook. You can find more leaders like him in our Founder section, and additional background at his Forbes profile.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Jensen Huang?
Jensen Huang is the co-founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, the semiconductor company whose GPUs power much of the world’s artificial intelligence computing. He has led the company since founding it in 1993.
When did Jensen Huang found NVIDIA?
He co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The company began by making graphics chips for gaming before becoming central to AI.
Why is NVIDIA so important to artificial intelligence?
NVIDIA’s GPUs are well suited to the heavy parallel computing that training AI models requires, and its CUDA software platform built a large developer ecosystem around them. Together those advantages made NVIDIA a leading supplier of AI computing power.
